Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

by Julie Smith

  It wasn’t anything like a cat and mouse, really. I was completely wrong about that. But have you ever seen a cat stalk a moth? He just stares at it first, unnerving the moth so it flies into a corner somewhere. Then the cat stares some more, having a swell old time, practically chuckling. Meanwhile, the moth flutters frantically, describing the same parabola over and over again, hitting its head against the sides of the corner. I don’t know why it never thinks of just flying up, but it doesn’t. Maybe the cat hypnotizes it. Anyway, when the cat is good and bored with all that, it just raises one dainty paw effortlessly—so fast you’ll miss it if you blink—and swings the paw down on the moth’s rear end. The moth’s head protrudes from underneath the paw, and the cat smiles at it. I have watched cats do this, and though they do not show their teeth, I guarantee you that they smile.

  After that paw is down, of course, it’s good-bye, moth; but hope springs eternal in the lepidopteran breast. It keeps right on struggling. This is about the point where Frank and I were when the telephone rang.

  His hands tightened like chains on my arms. I gasped, realizing the hopelessness of the situation. It was an effort to speak, but I did it. “Let me answer it.”

  He just kept me in that bruising grip, not saying a word. The phone rang five times and stopped.

  Frank pushed me roughly aside and sat up. The interruption seemed to imbue him with a new sense of immediacy, as if he realized it was to his advantage to dispatch me as quickly as possible and get out of there. “Are you expecting anyone?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to say “no,” because that would give him confidence, but on the other hand, if I said I was, he’d probably just unholster his gun and shoot without further ado. I opted for “no,” which was the sad truth.

  Then I started playing for time. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” I asked. He nodded. My heart doubled its speed. “How did you get in, anyway?”

  “You made it easy—by leaving a key on the doorsill.”

  “How about the downstairs gate?”

  “I just kept ringing doorbells until some trusting soul let me in without asking who I was.”

  “I see. Is that a trick you learned at the police academy?” He was leaning back on the sofa, apparently relaxed. But he was watching me. I was trying to think of some way to even the odds. But without much success. Without the Don Quixote sculpture, which the police had taken, I didn’t see anything that might make a suitable weapon.

  He answered my question. “So you know. I knew you’d find out sooner or later.”

  I nodded. “You realized it when you read that I’m a lawyer for HYENA. Or did you catch my act on the telly?”

  He didn’t answer, but I had already formed an opinion: I doubted he could read. I kept at him. “I defend a lot of prostitutes, and you probably arrest a lot of them. We were bound to run into each other. And I was bound to realize you don’t make nearly as many arrests as you could, right? George’s girls have nothing to fear from you, do they? Or are you George?”

  That was the situation as I saw it. I was about to get blown away for knowing too much, like some minor character in a movie. I didn’t really know why I was copping to it all, except that I didn’t want to get killed without confirming the reason why. He looked mean, but he didn’t answer, and all of a sudden I started to giggle. It was like that moment at the bordello when all I could think of was, “Cheezit, the cops!” It occurred to me that he ought to say, “Cut the crap, sister.” But he didn’t.

  He took out the gun again and held it on me while he walked over to the left-hand asparagus fern, as he had seen me do when I came in. He fished out the bundle and threw it over to me. “Count it.”

  “It’s all there,” I said. “Just like the last time you saw it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kandi stole it from you, didn’t she? And hid it before you could get here. You got in the same way you did tonight and killed her when she wouldn’t tell you—”

  “How much is it?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  He walked over to me and poked my ribs with the gun barrel again. I was almost getting used to it. His face had run the gamut of colors in a sunset and was now the shade of my dress.

  “Where did that bundle come from?”

  “I found it in the fern.”

  I never saw his free hand move, but I found out about it soon enough. At least I don’t have a glass jaw. I didn’t even stagger, even though the side of my face felt like the piano had fallen on it. “Don’t mess with me, Rebecca,” said someone about three counties away.

  I figured out it was Frank and shook my head violently, which hurt a lot. “You don’t have to hit me,” I said. “I swear to God I don’t know how it got there.”

  “Oh yes you do. And you’re gonna tell me in the next three minutes. Because that’s about how long it takes to drown, and you don’t want to drown, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He used his gun hand to twist my right arm around my back, and he pushed me over to the aquarium without a wasted movement. By pulling up on my arm and digging his elbow into my back, he forced me to bend over into the aquarium.

  But I’d had a hint about what was going to happen, and there was time to take a breath. So at first I didn’t have to deal with a mouthful of water. Only the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life, or the two worst—one in my shoulder and the other in the wrist he was gripping.

  I tried to flail out with my free arm, but I couldn’t move it. It was caught between our bodies. For a little while—maybe only seconds, I don’t know—I clenched my eyes shut as tightly as my teeth and concentrated on not hollering.

  He was twisting my arm higher and higher up my back, and I figured it wouldn’t be long before it came out of the socket. This would hurt even more, and if I hollered when it happened, my mouth would fill up with water, and this would cause my lungs to do the same, and this would cause death. I told myself that if I hadn’t screamed at the sight of a dead prostitute on my rug, I could make it through a little thing like a dislocated shoulder. I clenched my teeth even harder.

  And for some reason, I opened my eyes. My hair danced with the anemones, and it was rather beautiful, so I watched awhile. I don’t know if my shoulder and wrist were getting numb or if I just managed to distract myself, but it didn’t hurt quite so badly anymore. Perhaps I was on the verge of passing out from holding my breath.

  I caught sight of something red and realized it was my dress. Outside the aquarium. With some fascination, I took in the whole scene out there: part of Frank’s body, turned sideways against me, and part of mine, all red and dry, twisted against his. Those two bodies seemed about a million miles away from my aqueous quarters, which were beginning to be rather pleasant.

  Some tiny part of what I laughingly call my mind was working, though. I saw that Frank and I were situated nicely for the oldest trick in the world to work.

  I kneed him in the groin.

  I may not have a glass jaw, but Frank had a glass whatever. He fell backwards, letting go of my wrist and roaring like he was shot. The gun went flying, and so did I. Out the door and down the steps, my wicked-woman shoes clacking daintily as you please. That scream I’d been holding in came out along with half a dozen of its siblings, but I didn’t even mind that I’d lost my dignity. Didn’t notice, in fact. I just clacked and hollered to the bottom of the stairs and pressed the buzzer that opened the front gate. I took a moment to close the gate, hoping Frank would have to stop and figure out where the buzzer was. I heard him behind me already.

  I picked up the pot of geraniums on the little stoop outside the gate and ran toward Frank’s car, still screaming, and not even realizing it until people started looking out their windows. I heaved the pot through the front window of the car, got in, and picked up the microphone for his police radio. I was breathing so hard I must have sounded pretty ragged. “Help!” I shouted at about nine hundred decibels. “Two-eighty-two Gre
en Street. This is Rebecca Schwartz. Emergency! Help!” I was thinking of saying “ten-four” next, but Frank was clutching at me through the hole that used to be his window, so I just gave it one last “Help!” The radio operator was saying something, but I didn’t hear it.

  Suddenly Frank disappeared from the window, and I saw that a couple of men in bathrobes were hanging on to him. A woman opened the car door and asked me if I was all right. I guess they were neighbors, but I didn’t know them. I couldn’t answer the woman. I got out of the car silently, wondering how a person could live with a jackhammer where her heart should be. My chest felt like little bombs were going off inside it every split second, and I could barely hear the sirens above the noise of the old pump. I think Frank may have been trying to tell my rescuers he was a police officer, but I couldn’t hear that too well, either.

  The woman put her arm around my waist and got me to sit down on the curb. I drew up my knees and put my head down on them until I had my equilibrium back.

  When I looked up, I thought I was having a stroke or a psychedelic vision or something. Then I realized the flashing lights were outside my head. They were attached to police cars. Green Street looked like the Hall of Justice parking lot.

  Apparently, every cop in town had arrived, under the impression that something had happened to a brother officer. Everybody on the block was outside. Frank was gesturing toward me and thanking the cops for coming.

  I got up, perfectly calm and steady on my feet, and walked over to the knot of officers around Frank.

  “I’m Rebecca Schwartz,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of cockamamie story this man is giving you, but—”

  “Shut up,” said Frank. “You’re under arrest.”

  “I’ll be goddamned. You try to solicit me for prostitution, break into my apartment, stick a gun in my ribs, half-rape me, beat me up and try to drown me, and I'm under arrest?”

  “I tried to solicit you?” said Frank. “I meet you in a whorehouse, and you give me the key to your apartment and—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” interposed a pink-faced cop who looked about nineteen. “I think we’d better discuss this at the Hall.”

  Frank ignored him. “I waited for her in her apartment, ready to make a pinch for soliciting, and she came in and went to a big plant and looked in the flowerpot. I thought that was a little strange, so I took a look and she had this big bundle of money in there. She came flying at me, so I had to subdue her.”

  “Officer,” I said to Pink-face, “you will observe that I am approximately half his size. You will also observe brand-new bruises on my face and wrist, and it cannot escape your notice that my hair and dress are wet. Don’t you people have simpler ways of subduing people?”

  Pink-face looked like he wanted to cry. No cop wants to think the worst of another officer, but if I didn’t look like a victim of excessive force, I’m a red-haired shiksa.

  “Rebecca, are you all right?” said a voice that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Get back,” said Pink-face.

  “Rob Burns of the Chronicle,” said the voice, and I looked around in time to see him offer his press card for inspection. “Miss Schwartz is a friend of mine. Can you tell me what happened, Officer?”

  “I am not authorized to make any comment at this time,” said Pink-face, looking around for assistance. But the other cops had gone by now, all except his partner, who was busy talking to some of my rescuers.

  “Maybe Miss Schwartz will tell me, then. Rebecca, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, except that I’ve just been beaten up and nearly drowned by an officer of the law, two days after finding a dead woman in my living room. Other than that, everything’s peachy.”

  I mentioned Kandi to get a rise out of Pink-face, and it worked. Apparently he hadn’t put me together with the murder yet. Practically doing a double take, he flushed pinker still and bundled me into the squad car without another word.

  I waved to Rob and mouthed, “Call me.” Dad and Chris probably wouldn’t approve, but I was mad enough to tell him everything. Pink-face got in and started the engine.

  “Are we leaving without the money?” I asked, like the good citizen I am.

  “What money?”

  “The $25,000 I found in my flowerpot. I was about to take it down to the Hall when that ape came at me with a gun. Shall I go get it?”

  Of course he couldn’t turn down an offer like that, but he couldn’t let me go alone, either—or he thought he couldn’t—so he had to endure the humiliation of getting out of the car and escorting me inside while everyone watched. Once again, he suggested I change into dry clothes, but I settled for a coat; I wanted the cops to get the full effect.

  Pink-face and company let Frank drive his own car back to the Hall, which made me damn mad, considering who had done what to whom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Inspector Ziller was tall and built. He had a good jaw, a soft, drawly voice, and eyes to make a hypnotist eat his heart out. Inspector Shipe was a sweaty, pudgy cup-of-tea with hair too dark for his skin—and not much of it at that. They good-cop-bad-copped me in a room that made a boxcar look like a luxury suite. I hoped Frank’s accommodations were no better.

  “All right, Miss Schwartz, let’s have it,” said Shipe. Ziller just smiled. “How do you know Officer Jaycocks?” he said in that soft voice.

  “I met him Friday night at a bordello where he propositioned me, and I did not know his last name until now. I do not know what Officer Jaycocks was doing in such an establishment, but I can tell you that I was there to play the piano.”

  Ziller laughed outright. Shipe grumped.

  “Detailed records of my activities that evening can be found in your traffic bureau and with Inspectors Curry and Martinez of the Homicide Squad.”

  “Okay, okay, we know which Rebecca Schwartz you are,” said Shipe. “But look, Miss Schwartz, weren’t you dressed a little unconventionally Friday night?”

  “I was. I was impersonating a Marin County liberal’s idea of a prostitute.”

  Ziller smiled again, making it look as if he didn’t want to but he just couldn’t help it.

  “Impersonating?” asked Shipe. “Did I hear you say ‘impersonating’?”

  “I meant I was dressed like that.”

  “Well, maybe as long as you were dressed like that, you played a little game with yourself. Maybe with people who didn’t know you, you just didn’t say you were really a lawyer, and you let them draw their own conclusions.”

  I’d forgotten that part. I decided to come clean. “I did more than that. I told Officer Jaycocks a fictitious story about how I became a prostitute. That was no doubt why he propositioned me, but the fact is, he was the one who did the soliciting.”

  “You’re sure of that, Miss Schwartz? You’re sure you didn’t let that little game get out of hand a little?”

  “I’m sure I did let it get out of hand. But I didn’t suggest an illegal transaction, nor did I give Jaycocks the key to my apartment, as I believe he claimed. I can find twenty witnesses who will tell you that I keep an extra key on my doorsill.”

  “That’s very dangerous, Miss Schwartz,” said Ziller, ever so soothing and protective.

  “I’ll thank you not to be condescending,” I said. “Not only did Officer Jaycocks solicit me for an act of prostitution, but he also offered me a regular job with the High-Life Escort Service, which is why he tried to kill me.”

  Shipe gaped. “Do you think you could go over that again, Miss Schwartz?” said Ziller.

  I rummaged about in my purse, which I had picked up with the $25,000, and came up with the High-Life card. “I ran into him last night in the Washington Square Bar and Grill in front of roughly 125 witnesses, not all of whom I can name, but we can start with Jeannette von Phister, with whom I was having dinner.”

  “And?”

  “And he gave me this card and said to call if I needed work. What you have on your hands, boys,
is a crooked cop.” I handed over the card.

  “Miss Schwartz,” said the ever-polite Ziller, “I’m gonna give it to you straight; this is kind of a lot to swallow. You, a lawyer, meet a police officer in a bordello, and he thinks you’re a prostitute. Then, less than twenty-four hours later, you run into the same police officer in a trendy restaurant, and he offers you a job with an escort service.

  “Now wouldn’t you agree that’s pretty unlikely stuff? Unlikely that a police officer would be in a bordello. Unlikely he’d just happen to be in the same restaurant where you were the next day. Unlikely he really was recruiting for prostitution. And unlikely he showed up at your house if you didn’t invite him.”

  “Yes, now that you mention it.”

  “Well, how do you explain it?”

  “I would have thought explaining it was your department, Inspector, but let me give it a try. You may not like to think so, but it doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me that he was getting paid off to see that the High-Life girls didn’t get busted, and it’s just a step from there to picking up a little extra change by recruiting more women. Besides, maybe he liked that part of it. Maybe he actually owns a chunk of the business. Once you accept that, it gives you a reason for his being at the bordello—looking over the competition, maybe, or maybe scouting out talent for his own show. In fact, subsequent events bear out that possibility. Another possible explanation is that he was there on his appointed rounds as a police officer. He got a tip about the party and went investigating. Or a combination of the two: he was investigating for you people and working for George, too.”

  “Who’s George?”

  “According to Jeannette, he’s the guy who runs the High-Life service. She doesn’t know his last name and thinks George may be a pseudonym anyway. Shall I go on?”